Poet, dramaturge and public artist, Paul Carter, writes and draws public space as a movement form, representing the neglected dimensions of the meeting place. His poetics of the trace finds a superb visual metaphor in John Warwicker's book design. The essay is a drawing out of implications in the sketches, a suspension of related but different thematic molecules, from which on a 'like to like' principle, sketches are periodically hatched. Colloidal structures are formed at the interface between media: dispersing text and image through each other, the book's design discovers a new interface. Each page exhibits an 'enormous development of surface relative to the amount of matter present'. The magnification of subdivisions (the page) produces new textua distributions intermediate between the solid and the gaseous. The book inhabits its own neglected dimensions. It is a worked example of the view that writing and drawing enact and mobilise what they describe: in a CAD-dominated design culture, this redefinition of representation is timely and liberatory.

What about bringing the Centaurs back? They fascinate poets, archaeologists, inventors of video games. But, to judge from the old stories, when Centaurs meet humans, they are usually killed. With this violent history, why would Centaurs want to come back? To welcome the Centaurs (and not to kill them), we need to see them differently. Perhaps we need to see ourselves as the Centaurs see us. Return of the Centaurs is a ‘field guide’ to looking at the world as it looks back at us. It is an affectionate parody of empirical science’s lack of self-reflection. Through visionary drawings and poetic descriptions, twenty-four vanished species of Centaur come back to life. Perhaps they have always been here, but we were too broken, too self-absorbed, to notice them. A few Centaurs linger in zoos of the imagination: captives of art galleries and museums. In the spirit of the ‘new museology’, Paul Carter’s Centaurs are hypotheses for a citizen science that can liberate and re-wild them. Centaurs are not hybrids. We split nature in two (inner and outer). Centaurs make sense when we begin self-healing. When we start seeing the pattern of the whole, they will come back. Return of the Centaurs is a playful guide to doing this, a book of laughter and tears, compassion and satire.

Signature celebrates an aspect of Paul Carter’s distinguished public art practice, his unique typographical inscriptions installed in award-winning public space design projects, including Homebush Bay (Sydney 2000 Olympics), Federation Square, 180 Brisbane, State Square (Darwin), Scarborough Beach (WA), Harmony Square (Dandenong) and Yagan Square, Perth. The inscriptions are poetic compositions arising from the creative through lines, or place-making impulses, embedded in the site’s cultural and environmental history. As a rule, these identifying creative or generative traces are missed or recessed. By using a poetic logic able to expose convergences, coincidences and cross-overs of sense, Carter produces original place signatures. These differ from conventional dedicatory texts not only in their content but in their arrangement and distribution, which characteristically operate at a scale where reading and treading elide. Sean Hogan, Signature’s designer and Paul Carter were drawn to this book project by the challenge of putting writing designed to be ‘outside the book’ into a physical format whose unit was the page and whose conventional organisation was linear. Neither condition applies to the public space inscriptions, whose composition, internal design and external relationships are dictated by the social life of the city, not the solitary introspection of the reader. In this regard, each of the inscriptions offered a different challenge. While the nine ‘Contractions’ of ‘Golden Grove’ could be printed in regular lines, the ‘endless’ lines of ‘Relay’ resisted any kind of framing. There were other considerations: the nine ‘Federal Visions’ of ‘Nearamnew’ gain much from Carter’s own performance of the inscriptions; in this case, a quasimusical system of markings was improvised that respected the unusual mingling of quantitative, or length-based, phrasing and stress-based rhythmic arrangement. The goal of these typographic rearrangements and associated markings was the clarification of the poetic logic. A legibility was sought that preserved the original strangeness (or outsider status) of the compositions whilst making them legible within the book. This did not mean resisting playfulness: while it was agreed that the original typefaces should not be used – Signature is a poem book, not a catalogue – texts that called out for a poème concrète interpretation were presented uninhibitedly. The hinged English/Noongar inscriptions, adapted from ‘Mystic Edge’, dramatize the cross-cultural encounter storied in that bilingual work with an immediacy that could not be matched in the original ground inscription. Similarly, the single letter columns of ‘Rival Channels’ allude to the reed beds of the Brisbane River, a pictographic pun that had not been feasible in the original public artwork.

David Boyd (Australia, 1924-2011) is one of Australia’s most recognisable artists, having established a lifelong career exhibiting across Australia and internationally. The artist was a member of Australia’s highly distinguished artistic family, the Boyd dynasty. He was also one of the original signatories of the ‘Antipodean Manifesto’ in 1959, alongside his brother, Arthur Boyd, art historian Bernard Smith and artists John Brack, Robert Dickerson, Charles Blackman, Clifton Pugh and John Perceval, which launched a defence against abstract expressionism gaining a foothold in this country. Boyd’s work is represented by all major collecting institutions in Australia, public and private. Trials and Tribulations encapsulates the period and series of work on display, highlighting Boyd's exploration of the human condition and challenging the injustices of the world. It celebrates Boyd’s life as a multidisciplinary artist comprising works from seminal series such as 'The Tasmanians'; 'The Trials'; 'Church and State'; 'London Sfumatos'; 'Garden in the Wilderness'; and 'The Private View.'

Murray Walker (b. 1937 ) is a distinguished printmaker, a significant and recognised painter, a pioneering assemblage sculptor and collage artist, a ceramicist, a prolific tapestry designer and a nationally renowned and widely published authority on Australian colonial arts. His art is tough, challenging, at times unpalatable and frequently unfashionable. There is a visual curiosity, excitement and intensity in his art and a certain 'compression' where something that initially looks simple and directly engages the eye, on further viewing, becomes immensely complex, cerebral and in need of close and prolonged contemplation. Once you allow yourself to enter the world of Murray Walker you will be surprised, amused, horrified, delighted and inspired.

Murray Walker recycles, copies, steals and reclaims that which came before him to create a new reality, one which distinctly bears his hallmark, but retains traces of earlier makers. As an artist, he is a boundary rider, one who embraces street art, graffiti and folk crafts, yet remains an old-fashioned maker of beautifully crafted pictures that are anchored in the conventions of the old masters.

Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA is an Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University in Canberra, who works internationally as an art historian, art critic and curator. He studied at the universities of Melbourne, Moscow, London and Oxford and has served several terms as visiting scholar at Harvard University. In 2004 he was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, in 2005 he was awarded the Order of Australia (AM) for services to Australian art and art history and in 2008 was awarded a Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning. He has published over thirty books and over two thousand articles and catalogue essays dealing with various aspects of art. In 2013 his massive Australian Art: A history was published by Melbourne University Publishing and in 2015 his monographs on John Wolseley (Thames and Hudson), Inge King (Macmillan) and S.T. Gill (National Library of Australia) were published and in 2022 his books on Erwin Fabian and Joyce Evans appeared in print.

Hardcover book, 268 pages
28.5 cm by 22.5 cm 3.5 cm
$75

I Shed My Skin, A Furneaux Islands Story evolved out of an exhibition of Jane Giblin’s artwork which toured Tasmania in 2019. It revolves around strangers who come to a remote land and learn how to win a living from it. Traditions and relationships to the Furneaux Islands, built since the 1890s, were consolidated across five generations. During the latter part of the twentieth century significant changes had to be met.

Giblin travelled up and down the eastern seaboard of Australia interviewing her father’s cousins in addition to some senior Furneaux community members. She knew there was art to be made and stories to tell from their island lives. She sought memories of her great grandparents, feelings about the islands, and farming and birding as well as how they were acclimatizing to changed land access and tradition due to successful land rights claims by local First Nations people.

Giblin’s part-collaborator on her exhibition and book is retired lecturer in geography and well-known Tasmanian writer, Pete Hay. Hay accompanied Giblin on some of her visits to people and island places of significance; his wit, grit and heart providing a rich sounding board. His poetry and prose add significantly to Jane’s observations and artwork in this beautifully presented publication.